Katrina has made her disdain for my Midwestern dialect quite clear over the years. It's #17 on her list of things wrong with me. I never knew which was the more distressing notion: that there's a Midwestern dialect—after all, are you not all just perversions of the standard, which is us?—or that I'm receiving linguistic criticism from a Jersey girl. "On the TEE-vee, youze axents droive me nuts," she'll say, barely comprehensible behind all the Hoboken. "Yoir joist AUE-foll."
I always figured she was full of it. And then I called home this week, tapping my two good sisters for dinner next week when I briefly sneak into Columbus. My god, the nasality. Every vowel sounded like the a in bat. I'm related to these mongoloids? It was especially jarring to hear them back to back. "A, that's GRATE yer camang. A lark farward ta seeang ya!"
"So. Um. This Midwestern dialect of which you speak," I later said to an unabashedly delighted Katrina. "Wat as at A sand layk ta ya, agaan?"